Oriental Jones

By the time he died, Sir William Jones knew 15 Languages fluently and could get laid, drunk, and Tattooed, in another 30.

[…]He wrote so many essays, books, and pamphlets on all things Subcontinent that he became known as: Oriental Jones. Don’t look any further for the source of Lucas’s Indiana Jones—this is it.

[…] “Just as divine action occurred thru speech, philologists viewed language as the vehicle for religion, and indeed, for salvation.” Philology, like all academic disciplines, was at this time and place, dominated by the “romantic understanding of religion not as a set of propositions whose truth and falsity can be evaluated, but as an ineffable, prelinguistic experience expressed in language and symbol.” Tongue me, Sue! Tongue me! So Sanskrit and other Ur-tongues, as well as the “cultic rituals of Zoroastrian or Buddhists were mined for the ineffable experience they encoded.” They were treated as “windows into a putatively deeper level of religiosity…” These were thought to be “interchangeable with Kiki symbols and languages, since they considered the experience, not the symbol, as bearing truth and meaning.” Oh jesus, I’m all wet.